Nothing demonstrates the need for elasticity and scale like the Holiday Season. Manufacturing, distribution, and eCommerce companies experience a huge spike in their business, but nobody feels the pressure more than the big guy up North. You know—the jolly fellow, red suit, white beard—ring a (jingle) bell? It’s Santa Claus!

Application performance management (APM) tools are commonly used to monitor, manage, and/or maintain the performance and availability of software applications. Modern businesses rely on many APM tools to reliably deliver mission-critical applications to end users.

We haven’t expected much from our load balancers in the past. And why should we? Traditional load balancers had a relatively simple job (e.g. distribute traffic, SSL, some content switching), and functioned relatively well. End of story.

Last week, my colleague Chris wrote about his "buyer's remorse" (not!). If you are an F5 BIP-IP LTM (or a Citrix NetScaler SDX or MPX) customer, I would like to get you thinking about software load balancers.

I originally joined Avi Networks because I believed they had a robust, software-defined application delivery solution. It could do everything F5’s physical load balancers could do… or so I thought. After one week on the job, I’ve realized that Avi Networks only cuts costs by up to 70% only because you aren’t paying for hardware—hardware that can do a lot of things that Avi Networks just can’t do.

Unlike other countries, all U.S. citizens residing out of the country are required to pay their normal Federal taxes back to the “mother-ship.” This became painfully clear during my two tours of duty living in the United Kingdom. To make matters worse, the U.S. tax year has a different timing cycle than the U.K. tax year. Because of the offset tax years (and my domicile alternating twice between London and New York) I have spent the last six years filing taxes in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Not fun or easy to deal with.

Load balancers became popular about two decades ago with the dawn of the Internet age. With the goals of optimizing the performance of newly created websites and ensuring that end users had a responsive experience when visiting a site, the load balancer was an essential front end to web servers and applications. The load balancer plays the traffic cop, using different algorithms to optimize the distribution of traffic to backend servers.